Creolizing Homer for the stage: Walcott's The Odyssey - Derek Walcott - The Odyssey: A Stage Version - Critical Essay

What Walcott contributes to the original quest for home is the kind of insight gained from colonial experience. As the mixed descendant of white masters and black slaves, Walcott appreciates the complexity of establishing rather than returning "home." Menelaus's first lesson for Telemachus is to correct his assumption that home is a gift of God: "No. God's trial. We earn home, like everything else" (29). Thus, Walcott's creolization of Odysseus's homeward journey subtly alters the epic goal of reclaiming a kingdom.

The cyclops Walcott's Odysseus encounters becomes the embodiment of monolithic government a "thousand years" after Odysseus's time (60). The giant's eye is now identified with the singular pronoun I, a prominent trope in West Indian parlance. Although this cyclops I represents all the political and social depravity of "Babylon" rejected by Jamaica's nonconformist Rastafarians, Walcott plays on the complexity of their use of I. Rastafarian sociologist Jah Bones refers to the I as "the premier letter and sound as well as word." Moreover, he explains, for Rastafarian brethren the first-person singular pronoun or "I-man" also includes second-person "you-man" in so far as every person (playing on the sound) is simultaneously "hu-man" (46, 47). According to Ennis Edmonds, I (or plural I-an-I in the vernacular) represents "the divine principle that is in all humanity," as well as "rejection of subservience in Babylon culture and an affirmation of self as an active agent in the creation of one's own reality and iden tity" (33). Walcott's appreciation of such verbal implications is evident from his dramatization of the Rastafarian community in O Babylon! (1976). In The Odyssey, the eye/I conjunction underscores both Polyphemos's monomaniacal power and Odysseus's individual resistance--the assumption of solipsistic godhead on one hand, and the inner voice of reason, God, or social consciousness on the other.

A martial chorus prepares for the cynicism exploited in scenes 8 and 9 of the first act:

To die for the eye is best, it's the greatest glory:

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

There is no I after the eye, no more history, Except his own, Odysseus. (60)

When Walcott leaps a "thousand years," his reference to the "grey colonels" (62) makes explicit his focus on the years 1967--74, during which Greece suffered the brutal tyranny of Colonels George Papadopoulos, Nicholas Makarezos, and other right-wing officers (Clogg 186--99).The colonels' authoritarian grip on all areas of life is represented in the play through Polyphemos and his uniformed thugs. Under their rule history is forgotten, thought is forbidden, and in the cradle of democracy "There is no art, no theatre, no circuses" (61-63). Leading up to Odysseus's Nobody-is-my-name gambit, Walcott has his protagonist declare, despite his fame, "none of my virtues is nobler than all men's" (61). Then, when this "everyman" claiming to be nobody from nowhere in particular sees his life on the line, his Anansi training manifests itself in humorous black dialect. Odysseus dances before Polyphemos, teasing him about his looks, "Man, you so ugly nobody would believe it" (65).